sophistic movement, as Euripides is the outcome of it. He is an enthusiastic democrat of the early type. Listen to the pæans about freedom in the Persæ. That is the very spirit recorded by Herodotus as having made Athens rise from a commonplace Ionian state to be the model and the leader of Hellas. And the Persæ is not isolated. The king in the Suppliants is almost grotesquely constitutional; the Prometheus abounds in protests against despotism that breathe the true Athenian spirit; a large part of the Agamemnon is a merciless condemnation of the ideal of the conquering monarch. In the Eumenides, it is true, Æschylus definitely glorifies the Areopagus at a time when Ephialtes and Pericles were removing most of its jurisdiction. He was no opponent of Pericles, who was his 'chorêgus,' at least once;[1] but he was one of the men of 490. To that generation, as Aristotle's Constitution has taught us, the Areopagus was the incarnation of free Athens in battle against Persia; to the men of 460 it was an obsolete and anomalous body.
As to the religious orthodoxy of Æschylus, it appears certain that he was prosecuted for having divulged or otherwise offended against the mysteries, which suggests that he was obnoxious to the orthodox party. We may possibly accept the story, stated expressly by Clement, and implied by Aristotle (1111 a), that he escaped by proving that he had not been initiated, and consequently had nothing to divulge. For a distinguished Eleusinian not to have been initiated—if credible at all—would imply something like an anti-sacerdotal bias. Certainly he seems to have held no priesthoods himself, as Sophocles and Pindar did; and his historical position may
- ↑ C. I. A. 971.
